Frozen Inside Himself

By Jane Vandenburgh; Jane Vandenburgh is the author of a novel, ''Failure to Zigzag,'' which is about a schizophrenic.

Published: December 24, 1989

THE COMFORTS OF MADNESS By Paul Sayer. 120 pp. New York: Doubleday. $17.95.

PSYCHOTICS often use words in a tactile fashion, as if those words existed concretely, in three dimensions. Their language is like the thick paint that van Gogh used to depict this starry night, these particular sunflowers. It's a shock to realize how starkly beautiful madness can be made to seem - how pure and logical, how lucid, how true. In art, madness can be made to stare at itself in the mirror, coolly documenting the fact of the vanished ear.

Paul Sayer's fine first novel, ''The Comforts of Madness,'' does a very good job of showing what those comforts are. They are the artist's pleasures, but the artist's horrors too: seeing and hearing vividly, understanding quite perfectly, while being set tragically apart from the joys of living a real life.

The story is told from the point of view of Peter, a rigid catatonic who will make no voluntary movement of any muscle, including opening his mouth to admit the syringe that is used to feed him. He is a man in his early 30's, we learn, though he doesn't know this - nor any other thing about himself except the fact of his stasis. Peter is aged, ageless. He calls himself ''old clay-boots'' and does seem half buried in the clay of his own grave.

Because he knows almost nothing about himself, Peter, at least at the beginning, has nothing to tell us aside from the keenly witnessed, if somewhat minor, occurrences that take place at the two mental institutions he exists within, the first having given up on him, the second, called the One World Intensive Rehabilitation Center, having almost accidentally undertaken to try to exact his cure. When one foot twitches involuntarily and he can't draw it back into his inertia, Peter is subjected to a sensory deprivation treatment that induces painful memories; in a form of therapy that seems more like torture, he is deprived of food and water, then tied on a frame and hooded, forced to hang by his feet in a dark room.

In all good mad tales, there are the elements of mystery and surprise: How did Peter's reality come to rupture? Is there really no hope for him? Mr. Sayer (who was a psychiatric nurse in a hospital near York, England, and who won that country's 1988 Whitbread Book of the Year Award for this novel) ends up providing Peter with a past that makes sense to the reader: a seductive and unruly sister, a belligerent father who becomes quite demented, a mother who disappears.

''The Comforts of Madness'' is about the perversities of will. For Peter, its narrator, has an uncanny ability to sound not the slightest bit insane. He believes that his catatonia is a psychological problem, that it's all in his head. He wishes - as, by the novel's end, the skin of his back is suppurating and he has been frozen into a pretzellike position - that there really were something wrong with him.

Peter is not retarded, or autistic, but as a boy he declined to speak. Coming upon a toad, the silent child considered whether or not he should kill it. ''I ought to,'' the adult Peter remembers thinking at the time. ''The act of destroying a living creature might have done me good in some way, have transmuted something, imparted some kind of power, reinforced me. But I had never committed such an act and my will was now in decline.''

Peter's renunciation of all will is his greatest achievement. He smiles as he consigns himself to a complete passivity. He will not act, so he cannot kill himself. Still, if it were in his power, he would simply fail to breathe.

In madness, the eminent analyst Otto Fenichel says in ''The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis,'' we find the love addicts first; then there are those (like Melville's Ahab) who don't care about love but do become glued to the object of their desire, pursuing that object avidly, insanely, out of a need for proof that a world external to them even exists. These are the madnesses of appetite, which we can understand because we have appetites of our own. Peter's brand of psychosis is something else again.

The rigid catatonic, Fenichel suggests, remains frozen because the impulse to act is coupled with an equally compelling reason not to; Peter's need to continue to exist is balanced against his wish to cease. In its portrayal of this awful standoff, Paul Sayer's powerful and challenging novel is reminiscent of Franz Kafka's story ''The Hunger Artist,'' another short work that takes on such endless themes as art, appetite, volition and the death-in-life that is psychosis. Like Kafka's story, ''The Comforts of Madness'' is wild, extreme and slightly unbelievable, yet it rings absolutely true.